Four Scarpetta Novels

by Patricia Cornwell

  There has been no attempt to clean up what happened in the master bedroom, and what Berger and I find contrasts profoundly with the stillness and sterility of the rest of the house. First, there is what looks like a massive bright pink web spun by crime scene technicians who have used a method called stringing to find the trajectories of blood droplets that are simply everywhere. The objective is to determine distance, velocity and angle, to conjure up through a mathematical model the exact position of Bray’s body when each blow was struck. The results look like a strange modern art design, a weird fuchsia geometry that leads the eye to walls, ceiling, floor, antique furniture and the four ornate mirrors where Bray once admired her spectacular, sensual beauty. Coagulated puddles of blood on the floor are now hard and thick like dried molasses, and the king-size bed where Bray’s body was so crudely displayed looks as if someone dashed cans of black paint across the bare mattress.

  I feel Berger’s reaction as she stares. She is silent as she absorbs what is ghastly, truly incomprehensible. She becomes charged with a peculiar energy that only people, especially women, who battle violence for a living can really understand. “Where are the bed linens?” Berger opens the accordion file. “Were they turned in to the labs?”

  “We never found them,” I reply, and I am reminded of the motel room at the campground. Those bed linens are missing, too. Chandonne claims bed linens disappeared from his apartment in Paris, I recall his saying.

  “Removed before or after she was killed?” Berger slips photographs out of an envelope.

  “Before. That’s apparent from the bloody transfers on the bare mattress.” I step inside the room, moving around strings that point accusingly at Chandonne’s crime like long slender fingers. I show Berger unusual parallel smears on the mattress, the bloody stripes transferred by the coil handle of the chipping hammer when Chandonne set it down on the mattress between or after blows. Berger doesn’t see the pattern at first. She stares, slightly frowning as I decipher a chaos of dark stains that are handprints and smears where I believe Chandonne’s knees may have been as he was straddling the body and acting out his horrific sexual fantasies. “These patterns wouldn’t have been transferred to the mattress if there were linens on the bed at the time of the attack,” I explain.

  Berger studies a photograph of Bray on her back, sprawled across the middle of the mattress, black corduroy pants and belt on, but no shoes and socks, naked from the waist up, a smashed gold watch on her left wrist. A gold ring on her battered right hand is driven into the bone of her finger.

  “So either there were no linens on the bed at the time, or he removed them for some reason,” I add.

  “I’m trying to envision that.” Berger scans the mattress. “He’s in the house. He’s forcing her down the hallway, back to this area, to the bedroom. There’s no sign of a struggle—no evidence he injured her until they get in here and then boom! All hell breaks loose. My question is this: He gets her back here and then says, ‘Hey, wait a second while I strip the bed’? He takes time to do that?”

  “By the time he got her on the bed, I seriously doubt she was talking or able to run. If you look here and here and here and here.” I refer to segments of string taped to blood droplets that begin at the bedroom’s entrance. “Cast-off blood from the backswing of the weapon—in this case, the chipping hammer.”

  Berger follows the bright pink string design and tries to correlate what it indicates with what she is seeing in photographs she goes through. “Tell me the truth,” she says. “Do you really put a lot of credence in stringing? I know cops who think it’s bullshit and a huge waste of time.”

  “Not if the person knows what he’s doing and is faithful to the science.”

  “And the science is?”

  I explain to her that blood is ninety-one percent water. It adheres to the physics of liquid, and it is affected by motion and gravity. A typical drop of blood will fall 25.1 feet per second. Stain diameter increases as the dropping distance increases. Blood dripping into blood produces a corona of spatters around the original pool. Splashed blood produces long, narrow spatters around a central stain, and as blood dries, it goes from bright red to reddish-brown to brown to black. I know experts who have spent their entire careers affixing medicine droppers of blood to ring stands, using plumb lines, squeezing or dripping or pouring or projecting blood onto a variety of target surfaces from a variety of angles and heights, and walking through puddles and stamping and slapping, and experimenting. Then, of course, there is the math, the straight-line geometry and trigonometry for figuring out point of origin.

  The blood in Diane Bray’s bedroom, at a glance, is a videotape of what happened, but it is in a format that is unreadable unless we use science, experience and deductive reasoning to sort it out. Berger also wants me to use my intuition. Again, she wants me to edge beyond my clinical boundaries. I follow dozens of strands of string that connect spatters on the wall and the door frame and converge to a point in mid-air. Since you can’t tape string to thin air, the crime scene technicians moved an antique coat rack in from the foyer and taped the string some five feet from the base of it to determine the point of origin. I show Berger where Bray probably was standing when Chandonne struck the first blow.

  “She was several feet inside the door,” I say. “See this void area here?” I point out a space on the wall where there is no blood, just spatters in an aura all around it. “Her body or his blocked blood from hitting that part of the wall. She was upright. Or he was. And if he was upright, we can assume she was because you don’t stand straight up and beat someone who is on the floor.” I stand straight up and show her. “Not unless you have arms six feet long. Also, the point of origin is more than five feet off the floor, implying this is where the blows were connecting with their target. Her body. Most likely, her head.” I move several feet closer to the bed. “Now she’s down.”

  I point out smears and drips on the floor. I explain that stains produced from a ninety-degree angle are round. If, for example, you were on your hands and knees and blood was dripping straight down to the floor from your face, those drips would be round. Numerous drips on the floor are round. Some are smeared. They cover an approximate two-foot area. Bray was, for a brief time, on her hands and knees, perhaps trying to crawl as he kept on swinging.

  “Did he kick or stomp?” Berger asks.

  “Nothing I found would tell me that.” It is a good question. Stomping and kicking would add other shadings to the emotions of the crime.

  “Hands are more personal than feet,” Berger remarks. “That’s been my experience in lust murders. Rarely do I see kicking, stomping.”

  I walk around, pointing out more cast-off blood and satellite spatters before moving to a hardened puddle of blood several feet from the bed. “She bled out here,” I tell her. “This may be where he tore off her blouse and bra.”

  Berger shuffles through photographs and finds the one of Bray’s green satin blouse and black underwire bra on the floor several feet from the bed.

  “This close to the bed and we begin finding brain tissue.” I keep deciphering the gory hieroglyphics.

  “He places her body on the bed,” Berger interpolates. “Versus forcing her on it. Question is, is she still conscious when he gets her on the bed?”

  “I really don’t think so.” I point out tiny bits of blackened tissue adhering to the headboard, the walls, a bedside lamp, the ceiling over the bed. “Brain tissue. She doesn’t know what’s going on anymore. That’s just an opinion,” I offer.

  “Still alive?”

  “She’s still bleeding out.” I indicate dense black areas of the mattress. “That’s not an opinion. That’s a fact. She still has a blood pressure, but it’s very unlikely she’s conscious.”

  “Thank God.” Berger has gotten out her camera and begins taking photographs. I can tell she is skilled and has been properly trained. She walks out of the room and starts shooting as she comes back in, recreating what I have just walked he
r through and capturing it on film. “I’ll get Escudero back here and videotape it,” she lets me know.

  “The cops videoed it.”

  “I know,” she replies as the flash goes off again and again. She doesn’t care. Berger is a perfectionist. She wants it done her way. “I’d love to have you on tape explaining all this, but can’t do it.”

  She can’t, not unless she wants opposing counsel to have access to the same tape. Based on the resounding absence of note-taking, I am certain that she doesn’t want Rocky Caggiano to have access to a single word—written or spoken—that goes beyond what is on my standard reports. Her caution is extreme. I am shaded by suspicions that I have a hard time taking seriously. It really hasn’t penetrated that anyone might seriously think I murdered the woman whose blood is all around us and under our feet.

  BERGER AND I finish with the bedroom. Next we explore other areas of the house that I paid little if any attention to when I was working the scene. I did go through the medicine cabinet in the master bedroom. I always do that. What people keep to alleviate bodily discomforts tells quite a story. I know who has migraines or mental illness or is obsessive about health. I know that Bray’s chemicals of choice, for example, were Valium and Ativan. I found hundreds of pills that she had put in Nuprin and Tylenol PM bottles. She had a small amount of BuSpar, too. Bray liked sedatives. She craved soothing. Berger and I explore a guest bedroom down the hall. It is a room I have never stepped inside, and unsurprisingly, it is unlived-in. It isn’t even furnished, but instead is cluttered with boxes that Bray apparently never unpacked.

  “Are you getting the sensation that she wasn’t planning on staying here long?” Berger is beginning to talk to me as if I am part of her prosecution team, her second seat in the trial. “Because I sure am. And you don’t take on a major position in a police department without assuming you’re going to stick it out for at least a few years. Even if the job is nothing but a stepping stone.”

  I look around inside the bathroom and note there is no toilet paper, no tissues, not even soap. But what I find inside the medicine cabinet surprises me. “Ex-Lax,” I announce. “At least a dozen boxes.”

  Berger appears in the doorway. “Well, I’ll be damned,” she says. “Maybe our vain friend had an eating disorder.”

  It is not uncommon with people who suffer from bulimia to use laxatives to purge themselves after bingeing. I lift the toilet seat and find evidence of vomit that has splashed up on the inside of the rim and the bowl. It is a reddish color. Bray supposedly ate pizza before she died, and I recall that she had very little stomach contents: traces of ground meat and vegetables.

  “If someone threw up after eating and then died maybe a half hour or hour later, would you expect his stomach to be totally empty?” Berger follows what I am piecing together.

  “There would still be traces of food clinging to the stomach lining.” I lower the toilet seat. “A stomach isn’t totally empty or clean unless the person has drunk huge amounts of water and purged. Like a lavage or a repeated infusion of water to wash out a poison, let’s say.” Another section of footage plays before my eyes. This room was Bray’s dirty, shameful secret. It is closed off from the regular flow of the house and no one but Bray ever came back here, so there was no fear of discovery, and I know enough about eating disorders and addictions to be very aware of the person’s desperate need to hide his shameful ritual from others. Bray was determined that no one would ever catch even the slightest hint that she was bingeing and purging, and perhaps her problem explains why she kept so little food in the house. Perhaps the medications helped control the anxiety that is inevitably part of any compulsion.

  “Maybe this is one of the reasons she was so quick to run Anderson off after eating,” Berger conjectures. “Bray wanted to get rid of the food and wanted privacy.”

  “That would be at least one reason,” I reply. “People with this affliction are so overwhelmed by the impulse it tends to override anything else that might be going on. So yes, she might have wanted to be alone to take care of her problem. And she might have been back here in this bathroom when Chandonne showed up.”

  “Thus adding to her vulnerability.” Berger takes photographs of the Ex-Lax inside the medicine cabinet.

  “Yes. She would have been alarmed and paranoid if she was in the middle of her ritual. And her first thought would have been about what she was doing—not about any imminent danger.”

  “Distracted.” Berger bends over and photographs the toilet bowl.

  “Extremely distracted.”

  “So she hurries to finish what she’s doing, vomiting, ” Berger reconstructs. “She rushes out of here and shuts the door and goes to the front door. She’s assuming it’s Anderson who’s out there knocking three times. Very possibly, Bray’s rattled and annoyed and might even start saying something angry as she opens the door and . . .” Berger steps back out in the hallway, her mouth grimly set. “She’s dead.”

  She lets this scenario hang pregnantly as we seek out the laundry room. She knows I can relate to the distraction and mind-searing horror of opening the front door and having Chandonne suddenly rush in from the darkness like a creature out of hell. Berger opens hall closet doors, then finds a door that leads to the basement. The laundry area is down here, and I feel strangely unsettled and unnerved as we walk about in the harsh glare of naked overhead lightbulbs that are turned on by tugging strings. I have never been in this part of the house, either. I have never seen the bright red Jaguar I have heard so much about. It is absurdly out of place in this dark, cluttered, dismal space. The car is gorgeously bold and an on-the-nose symbol of the power Bray craved and flaunted. I am reminded of what Anderson angrily said about her being Bray’s “gofer.” I seriously doubt Bray ever drove to the carwash herself.

  The basement garage looks the way I imagine it did when Bray bought the house: a dusty, dark, concrete space frozen in time. There is no sign of improvements. Tools hanging on a pegboard and a push lawn mower are old and rusting. Spare tires lean against a wall. The washer and dryer are not new and although I feel certain the police checked them, I see no sign of it. Both machines are full. Whenever Bray did laundry last, she didn’t bother to empty either the washer or dryer, and lingerie, jeans and towels are hopelessly wrinkled and smell sour. Socks, more towels and work-out clothes in the washer were never put through the cycle. I pull out a Speedo running shirt. “Did she belong to a gym?” I ask.

  “Good question. Vain and obsessive as she was, I suspect she did something to keep in shape.” Berger digs through clothes in the washer and pulls out a pair of panties that are spotted with blood in the crotch. “Talk about airing someone’s dirty laundry,” she ruefully comments. “Even I feel like a voyeur sometimes. So maybe she had her period recently. Not that it necessarily has anything to do with the price of tea in China.”

  “It might have,” I reply. “Depends on how it affected her moods. PMS could certainly make her eating disorder worse, and mood swings couldn’t have helped her volatile relationship with Anderson.”

  “Pretty amazing to think about the common, mundane things that can lead to catastrophe.” Berger drops the panties back into the machine. “I had a case one time. This man has to pee and decides to pull off Bleecker Street and relieve himself in an alleyway. He can’t see what he’s doing until another car goes by and illuminates the alleyway just enough for the poor old guy to realize he’s peeing on a bloody dead body. The guy peeing has a heart attack. A little later, a cop investigates this car illegally parked, goes in the alleyway and finds a dead Hispanic with multiple stab wounds. Next to him is a dead older white male with his dick hanging out of his unzipped pants.” Berger goes to a sink and rinses her hands, shakes them dry. “Took a little while to figure that one out,” she says.

  CHAPTER 27

  WE FINISH WITH Bray’s house at half past nine, and although I am tired, it would be impossible for me to even think about sleeping. I am energized in a strung-out way. My
mind is lit up like a huge city at night and I almost feel feverish. I would never want to admit to anyone how much I actually enjoy working with Berger. She misses nothing. She keeps even more to herself. She has me intrigued. I have tasted the forbidden fruit of straying from my bureaucratic boundaries and I like it. I am flexing muscles I rarely get to use because she is not limiting my areas of expertise, and she is not territorial or insecure. Maybe I also want her to respect me, too. She has encountered me at my lowest point, when I am accused. She returns the house key to Eric Bray, who has no questions for us. He doesn’t even seem curious but just wants to be on his way.

  “How are you feeling?” Berger asks me as we drive off. “Holding up?”

  “Holding up,” I affirm.

  She turns on an overhead light and squints at a Post-it on the dash. She dials a number on her car phone, leaving it on speaker. Her own recorded announcement comes on and she hits a code to see how many messages she has. Eight. And she picks up the handset so I can’t hear them. This seems odd. Is there some reason she wanted me to know how many messages she has? I am alone with my thoughts for the next few minutes as she drives through my neighborhood, the phone against her ear. She goes through messages quickly and I suspect we share the same impatient habit. If someone is long-winded, I tend to delete the message before it is finished. Berger, I bet, does the same thing. We follow Sulgrave Road through the heart of Windsor Farms, passing the Virginia House and Agecroft Hall—ancient Tudor mansions that were dismantled and crated in England and shipped over here by wealthy Richmonders back in an era when this part of the city was one huge estate.